 |
|
The letter was addressed to Eichmann who telephoned almost daily to
Höppner, his agent in Posen. "Give me that in writing" Eichmann
would have said, and put the written letter into the hierarchical
process. Höppner did not want an order, he asked for the complete
examination of his new recommendation. He found it audacious,
"partially fantastic" but "completely feasible." In addition, he spoke
exclusively of the murder of those unable to work, not all the 500,000
Jews for which he was responsible in the Warthegau and especially in
the Lodz Ghetto. The others he wanted to confine in a work camp, all
child bearing women sterilized, "so that the Jewish problem will be
completely resolved with this generation."
By the end of September 1944, Eichmann still had been able to
only circumspectly answer the incessant pressure of Höppner. In
any event the document strengthens the theory of the progressive
discrimination against the Jews to the point of complete segregation
and impoverishment in which the long practiced policy of social death
transformed itself into industrial extermination in conformity with
internal logic, no longer directed by anyone.
Apart from the question of whether an order preceded the Holocaust,
confusion reigned as well about the date of the decision. Some
historians opined with good reasons for March 1941, others
increasingly for September/October of the same year. The predominant
opinion was nonetheless that "at the high point of the expectation of
victory" in the eastern war on July 31, 1941 "all had become
clear." Regardless however whether they saw Hitler as the originator
or the moderator, almost all researchers held that the "Final
Solution" had developed out of anti-Jewish measures. They emphasized
the primacy of the ideological, and thus foreclosed on the possibility
of even considering the moderating effect of other political and
military factors on the policy towards the Jews. That held good for
the externally changing occupation and germanisation policy, for the
war, economic and food situations. Abandoned as well was the inductive
interaction of people and leadership that Victor Klemperer so
painstakingly reported on.
Now Gerlach has put a provisional end to the argument of the
schools. He does not trouble himself with the invective of the (here
as well as there) deeply ordered footnote fronts. He works strictly
empirically. The point of departure for his research is his
dissertation completed under Wolfgang Scheffler: "The German Economic
and Annihilation Policy in White Russia," and his participation in the
ground breaking - by a free association of young historians -
annotated edition of the agendas and notebooks of
Heinrich Himmler from the years 1941 and 1942. Important parts of
these documents were first known and available in the Moscow archives
in 1991.
Christian Gerlach claims and proves that Adolf Hitler made
known his fundamental decision for the complete annihilation of the
European Jews on December 12, 1941. On this day, Hitler
spoke in his private rooms of the Reich Chancellery to around
50 Reich and Gau leaders, the supreme leadership of the NSDAP
[Nazi party]. Almost all occupied offices of the State as
well. The meeting was announced on the 9th by telegram for the 10th,
that day postponed until the 11th and then again postponed to the
following day. Heydrich had sent his invitations to the Wannsee
Conference on November 29 and then set the date of the conference
for December 9. On December 8, he postponed it for an
unspecified time. Only a month later, the new invitations went out -
for January 20, 1942.
Even the parallelism of the events gives Hitler's speech a certain
weight. But what weight, when the first invitation to the Wannsee
Conference had been already sent 14 days previously? The postponement
followed, one could assert, the political confusion that the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor - not desired by the German leadership - had
caused. But Gerlach substantiates with convincing details that the
originally planned Wannsee Conference had had an entirely different
theme as that which actually took place six weeks later. It had only
been anticipated to discuss problems that occurred with the
deportations of the (Greater) German Jews. These had begun on
October 15, under the pressure of the Lord Mayors, Gauleiters and
government presidents, following an expressed approval of Hitler, that
according to Himmler's agenda dates to September 17. The
destination train stations were Lodz, Riga, Kaunas, Minsk. The
difficulties and tension were enormous: they involved the precise
differentiation between the so-called full and half Jews, protests
from the population for the retention of those who worked in the
armaments industry, questions of property, the tempo and priorities of
the "resettlements." Only after Hitler's speech of December 12
was Heydrich able, as Gerlach shows, to broaden the theme and fix a
conference on the "Final Solution of the European Jewish question."
Hitler spoke to his most trusted comrades on the occasion of the
most vexatious crisis of his leadership. Aachen had suffered very
heavy bombing attacks on December 8, Cologne the night before, the
Luftwaffe had lost 2,093 planes on the eastern front since June 22,
the tank motors were useless and frozen, the locomotives built in the
western European style were stuck in the crudely built eastern railway
gauge, 160,000 soldiers of the eastern Army had fallen, thousands
froze in ditches and military hospitals. The troops were "finished,"
reported the generals. The counter offensive of the Red Army had
begun. In the Reich, rumours spread about further reductions in the
rations for meat and fat.
On the other side of the world, Japan had not, as the German treaty
partner had suggested and hoped, made war on the eastern Soviet Union,
but had attacked the USA. Germany had to react with a declaration of
war on the USA on December 11. For Hitler, the world war had now
begun. It was all or nothing. At this time, Hitler assumed the supreme
military command ("the little bit of leading the operations"), ordered
draconian harshness in the occupied European countries ("death penalty
fundamentally appropriate"), and to the soldiers of the east front he
only had to offer the call for "fanatical resistance."
What Hitler said about the Jewish question on December 12 is
reported twice, in almost identical formulations: once in the diary
entry of December 13 by the Berlin Gauleiter and Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels and once in the government diary of the
Reichleiter and Cracow General Governor Hans Frank of
December 16. "In respect of the Jewish question, the Fuehrer has
decided," so says Goebbels, "to make a clean sweep. The world war is
here, the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary result. This
question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We are not here to
have sympathy with the Jews, but rather with our German people. If the
German people have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so
the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their
lives."
Two days later Rosenberg, Reichsleiter for Ideology and Minister
for the Occupied Territories presented a draft speech to Hitler for
approval and noted: "On the Jewish question I said that the comments
on the New York Jews will now have to be changed a bit following the
decision." On December 18, the Section Leader of General Policy
in the Eastern Ministry, Otto Braeutigam, later chief of the eastern
department in the Bonn Foreign Office, noted: "On the Jewish question
clarity must have been achieved in the meantime through oral
conversations."
On December 14 Himmler met the man who in Hitler's Chancellery was
responsible for the murder of the German mentally ill - Victor Brack.
Already annihilation in gas chambers had been described as the
"application of the Brack remedy." Himmler noted the speaking points
as "course in east ministry, euthanasia." At the same time, Brack's
superior, Reichsleiter Phillip Bouhler had two meetings with Hitler.
In all these conversations the same theme was discussed: the transfer
of the "well practiced personnel" that had run the gas chambers of
"euthanasia" to the extermination camps that would now be built and
built up for the murder of all Jews. As Bouhler put it: the transfer
of his people "to a definitive solution of the Jewish question."
Our cultural circle
The emphasis was on the word "definitive." Up to December 12,
a million Jews had already been murdered: in the occupied territories
of the Soviet Union first the able-bodied men, since the middle of
August also women, children and the elderly. The ghettos were starved
out. In the vicinity of Lodz, in Chelmno, mass murders by means of gas
wagons had already begun on December 8. However, the murders here
were subject to limits: the victims were first - exactly allocated -
100,000 Jews unfit for work, in the sense of the notion that
Höppner had had in July. Planned and built since October, the
extermination camp Belzec had a capacity that reached the gassing of
500 people per day. The conception of this camp was also based on
the selection of the unfit for work. When the extermination
installation was functional in March 1942, it was only used for
six weeks, then closed and within four weeks built up to a daily
extermination capacity of 2000 deportees; the construction of the
other extermination camps followed.
Independent of Hitler's fundamental decision, the practitioners of
the German racial policy had discussed the murder of the Jews in all
occupied eastern European countries, asked for it, or already begun
it. But before December 12, they did not have a complete concept. The
unfit for work, the able-bodied, finally the eastern Jews overall they
had gradually brought into the circle of destruction, and by exception
only a few thousand German Jews. Local and regional initiatives
document the widespread will for destruction, and incidentally the
limits: the murder of the eastern Jewish "indigenous bestial hordes,"
as the General Commissar in Minsk put it, is something other that the
murder of "humans, who come from our cultural circle." On December 16
he requested "official permission" for murder, that he could not in
the case of German Jews give "on his own authority."
He did not yet know the contents of Hitler's confidential speech.
After all, Hitler's overall responsibility is not in dispute. Hitler
did not order, but approved in all clarity that which in many
locations had already begun and many had long wanted. This helped the
functionaries of the racist nation to gain their ultimate "planning
security." Christian Gerlach has discovered the Archimedes point that
allows more clearly than ever before the tracing and clarification of
the political development of the Holocaust.
|
